Waveguide-Integrated Light-Emitting Metal-Insulator-Graphene Tunnel Junctions.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 37097286.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c04975 and PMC identifier 10176563.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Ultrafast interfacing of electrical and optical signals at the nanoscale is highly desired for on-chip applications including optical interconnects and data processing devices. Here, we report electrically driven nanoscale optical sources based on metal-insulator-graphene tunnel junctions (MIG-TJs), featuring waveguided output with broadband spectral characteristics. Electrically driven inelastic tunneling in a MIG-TJ, realized by integrating a silver nanowire with graphene, provides broadband excitation of plasmonic modes in the junction with propagation lengths of several micrometers (∼10 times larger than that for metal-insulator-metal junctions), which therefore propagate toward the junction edge with low loss and couple to the nanowire waveguide with an efficiency of ∼70% (∼1000 times higher than that for metal-insulator-metal junctions). Alternatively, lateral coupling of the MIG-TJ to a semiconductor nanowire provides a platform for efficient outcoupling of electrically driven plasmonic signals to low-loss photonic waveguides, showing potential for applications at various integration levels.